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Posted By: Sponge Bob

Posted On: Sep 24, 2009
Views: 14410
arm or not to arm

In response to Capt Walker or should I say Barrister Walker, why must it be a competently trained deck officer? Engineer officers and the ratings are trained alike here in the US in small arms.


Posted By: Capt Kell Walker

Posted On: Sep 23, 2009
Views: 14338
arm or not to arm

As a Ship’s Master and a lawyer that has experienced firsthand of a vicious attack by pirates believe that I am in a better position than most of the armchair critics that fallaciously claim that merchant ships should not be armed.
If not for the fact that I and 3 of my deck officers were not armed I believe that I would not be here today to comment on this ongoing debate.
We send soldiers and sailors to war with 3 months training to be killed or to kill, we put on the streets law enforcement officers with 3 months training, why then can’t we train deck officers to protect our ships and crew? Ongoing training is essential in this respect including unarmed combat.
My experience with pirates found that they are not organized in a military fashion and rely on fear as their best weapon of attack. A well trained deck officer with the necessary fire power (and you don’t need a machine gun) is no match for pirates in a skiff. The Barrett M107 50 calibre sniper rifle will put the ****s up any pirate even if armed with a rocket launcher. With 4 Glock 22 and 3 pump action shotguns would be enough fire power that would be required to defend your ship and crew


Posted By: Retired C/E

Posted On: Sep 23, 2009
Views: 14216
Arming Crews

Here is my feeling on arming crews: Don't do it. No matter how much training a crew member received, a pirate will be better trained, and any crew member holding a weapon will be a dead crew member. If companies are worried about pirates then the companies should put PROFESSIONAL SECURITY PERSONNEL on board to protect the ship. Crew are hired to operate and maintain the vessel, not to defend the vessel against attack. The pirates do not want to harm the crews, they need the crew to move the ship from place to place until the ransom is paid.


Posted By: SpongeBob

Posted On: Sep 19, 2009
Views: 7839
AKER Philly

Seems Tim Colton doesn't like AKER Philly. Must be because they can build ships without Cajun or Navy mentality. They are doing a good job with their series of tankers, the containerships came out alright and if the market would bear any more construction they'd keep on going. Better have a few more KoolAid's with Boysie Bollinger or the Chouest boys. It appears you believe the only ones that can build ships are the swamp lot shipyards of the south.


Posted By: HARD TRUTH

Posted On: Sep 12, 2009
Views: 8074
Drinking Kool Ade, Junaid?

Poor fishermen who pick up guns are pirates and legitimate targets for lethal countermeasures. Once the gun is in their hands they are asking to be shot


Posted By: junaid

Posted On: Sep 11, 2009
Views: 8044
the Lies about pirates

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century”.

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.” This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?


Posted By: Brady

Posted On: Sep 11, 2009
Views: 7925
Missing the point

The crux of the problem with merchant ship pirate defense is simple. 4000 men and weapons on an aircraft carrier, 20 men and no guns on a tanker the same length. The sparse crew numbers and stretched work resposibilities of merchies are the real problem. Training crews and giving them weapons is not the answer. You can't shoot when you're asleep after a 12 hour workday. Armed escorts are realistic defense tools. But they have to be additional people with real weapons and tools for repelling bad guys. Remember if Exxon hadn't convinced the USCG that they didn't need a local pilot to Hinchinbrook entrance they (Exxon)wouldn't have forced their mates to get pilotage and do you seriously think a rested pilot would have run that ship on bligh reef?


Posted By: Flying Dutchman

Posted On: Sep 10, 2009
Views: 7874
Arm Merchant Ships

Pirates will continue their "business" because they do not receive adequate response. Some crew members must be trained and arm to be kept in safe box. For navigation in dangerous waters crew could be increased for 2-3 AB to keep watch
Separate security team acceptable on big ships with valuable cargoes.
The international legislation against pirates to be urgently worked out.


Posted By: Capt D.

Posted On: Sep 1, 2009
Views: 8148
Arm the Crew - Do It Now!

Amid all the hand-wringing by shipowners afraid of liability and the naysayers in the security business who are simply trying to feather their own nest, let's not lose sight of the real issue when it comes to Arming the Crew - and it's not about piracy.

This issue has morphed beyond the activity of the bandits in the HOA, GOA and IO. Since the well-publicized taking of the ALABAMA I have no doubt that every terrorist group in the world is dusting off it's "maritime attack" plans armed with the knowledge that any merchant ship, in any port, anywhere in the world can be had for the taking. At worst they may encounter a blustering rent-a-cop; at best they will find the crew locked up in some panic room.

One doesn't have to have too fertile an imagination to envisage the consequences of terrorists taking over a supertanker, a pax ship, or a gas carrier. Ram the Golden Gate, pollute the Cote d'Azur, breach the dam at Gatun lake - the scenarios are endless and will make 9/11 seem tame in comparison. And when Al Qaida comes a'knocking it won't be a bunch of teenagers armed with AK-47's. Ransom will be the furthest thing from their mind.

I've had rifles, shotguns and pistols in my weapons locker for 25 years. My crew trains annually with the weapons and also undergoes training in the use of deadly force. No one has ever gotten shot.

Failing to arm the crews of merchant ships is tantamount to leaving the cockpit door open. This should not be a decision left to the IMO, shipowners or underwriters. The stakes are too high.


Posted By: TxMarEng

Posted On: Aug 28, 2009
Views: 8236
ARAPAHO

August 09 Issue Page 10 Maersk Line ltd appears to be trying to claim some new afloat forward staging base. Looks a lot like the ARAPAHO project that MarAd proved feasible in the 80's only to be shot down by the carrier types in NavSea. Believe the system was given to the Brits during the Falkland crisis. Trust me it worked fine but the Flyboys didn't want anything encroaching on their ability to build more carriers or amphib types.


Posted By: MODERATOR

Posted On: Aug 27, 2009
Views: 8156
SHOTS AT HELICOPTER

It happened--and we've posted the video on the site


Posted By: NMMarEng

Posted On: Aug 27, 2009
Views: 7992
Chopper fired upon

What's this story of a US chopper being fored upon by a Somali pirate mother ship with large caliber weapons? And the question is ~ Why didn't they shoot back? Time the international maritime community asked some questions and demand some answers including an inquiry by the IMO into the incident.


Posted By: Capt B.

Posted On: Aug 19, 2009
Views: 8188
Armed? You bet!

You bet! Put a couple three Phalanx vulcan cannons aboard ships and those pirates will get a rude surprise! Do that on numerous ships, and the pirato's will likely take up another line of work. In addition, train the defensive system operators / crews of course, and have the guns concealed either under cover, or camoflaged somehow, sort of a "concealed carry" system.


Posted By: Capt Laszlo Simon

Posted On: Aug 10, 2009
Views: 8497
Arm Merchant ship

I saw & reading the international articles on this actual situation and is very delicate but must be need to take inmediately action on this matter, the best way in my personal opinion shall be On board a special team with guns and others special arms for protection the life and the vessel.
the seafarers shall be need to protection from the Company's side. carefully if this dangerous situation to extent on the Caribean area, hoping the OMI and the strong countries to put the all programs to reduce totally this threat for all Seafarers on the world


Posted By: MODERATOR

Posted On: Aug 8, 2009
Views: 8476
DELETED COMMENTS

Apologies to those concerned. In deleting some spam comments a couple of real comments got trashed. If one was yours, please repost!


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